Adobe InDesign is a great tool for designing
visually appealing documents, brochures, and newsletters. Most of us will be creating these for digital
distribution, often in the form of a PDF. If not done correctly, the resulting document
can be very difficult to make accessible without a significant investment in staff time or
by outsourcing, which can often cost $8-$10 per page. By paying attention to a few extra details
when you design your document, you can ensure that your InDesign export to PDF is as accessible
as possible, without requiring significant remediation. In this session we will cover what features
a PDF document requires in order to be considered accessible, how InDesign works with Adobe
Acrobat to facilitate the creation of accessible PDFs, and what export settings you need to
be aware of to ensure that the accessibility features you add to the document are retained
on export. In order for a PDF to be considered accessible
to people with disabilities, including screen reader users, a PDF should have these features. First, good color contrast and clear, readable
fonts with adequate line spacing. These are design decisions that need to be
made early in the process. Once a document is exported to PDF there isn’t
much that can be done to fix poor color or font choices. I have a separate short lesson on how to ensure
good color contrast which I’ll link in the description of this video. The rest of these features are things that
designers can build into the document right in InDesign. We’ll be looking at things like adding title
metadata, ensuring a logical heading structure, creating a table or contents with PDF bookmarks
for longer documents, ensuring that the PDF is tagged properly for screen reader users,
and that the reading order is logical. We’ll look at how to add alternative text
to our images for screen reader users, and how to ensure that the tables, lists, and
links are all properly formatted for export to PDF. Let’s start with an easy one. When a screen reader user opens your PDF we
want to be sure that the document title is the first thing that’s announced. We can do this by adding the title to the
file metadata. So, we’ll click File > File Info
And we’ll add the document title in plain language to the Document Title field
And click OK. Most screen reading software doesn’t actually
read the visible text that you see on the screen. Instead, it uses the tag tree to interpret
the document structure, content, and reading order much the same way as your web browser
uses HTML tags to present you with a web page. Without any tags, the screen reader would
interpret this document as blank. There are many types of tags that make up
the tag tree. Screen reading software relies on the semantic
tags that help convey the document structure. For example,
Heading tags indicate a heading, for example a heading level 1 for the title, heading level
2 for major sections, and heading level 3 for subsections. The P tag indicates paragraph or body text. Graphical content would be in a figure or
artifact tag depending on whether it’s considered a meaningful image or just decorative. Meaningful images would have alternative text
in the properties of the figure tag. This is text that’s read aloud by the screen
reader when it encounters the image. Tables are inside of table tags, lists are
marked up inside of list tags and so on. Tags come from the source document. Let’s look at how to ensure that the PDF
you export from InDesign is properly tagged for screen reading software. InDesign will automatically tag paragraph
text, tables, and lists, but in order for your document headings to be exported properly
to the correct heading level 1, heading level 2, and heading level 3, you’ll need to map
the paragraph style to its associated export tag. To do this, open the Paragraph Styles pane. Right-click a style and choose: Edit
From the Paragraph Style Options dialog, click Export Tagging
And in the PDF section, associate the chosen paragraph style with the appropriate semantic
export tag. Keep in mind when you’re creating and naming
your styles that you’ll need to map them and choose a style name that conveys the structural
significance of the text as well as the visual description and it will make it much easier
for you to do this kind of mapping. If you prefer, you can choose to set all export
tags at one time. In the Paragraph Styles panel, click Edit
All Export Tags from the menu in the upper right of the panel. Be sure to select the PDF radio button above
the styles list. Keep in mind that doing it this way requires
that you have a good understanding of the style names and which should be mapped to
heading levels. Reading order is the order in which screen
reading software reads the document content. With a simple top-to-bottom, left-to-right
text document, reading order is seldom an issue. But with more complex layouts the reading
order often needs to be set manually. This is done by adding content to the Articles
Panel. To set the reading order using the Articles
Panel: Click Window > Articles
Drag document objects to the Articles panel in the order in which they are to be read. Make sure that the Include when Exporting
box is checked. Continue to add all page content to the Articles
panel. Anything that’s not added to the articles
panel will not be tagged for export to the reading order in the PDF. In some cases this is fine. For example if this graphic were a logo I
would want to be sure to add it to the reading order. If it is just decorative, and doesn’t convey
any meaning, I could safely leave it out. In most cases, you will be adding all textual
content, with the exception of repeated background content like repeated headers or footers. You can shift-click to add multiple pieces
of content at once, but take care to shift-click in the order you want them to be read. I’ll speed this up as I add the rest of
the document content and I’ll be back in a moment. Now that I’ve added all of my document content
to the Articles panel, there’s one more thing I need to check. From the menu in the upper right of the Articles
pane, be sure to choose Use for Tagging Order in Tagged PDF. Longer documents should have a linked table
of contents for ease of navigation. PDF bookmarks are also required for longer
documents, and can be created directly from the table of contents. Both the table of contents and bookmarks are
based on your paragraph styles. To generate a Table of Contents and Bookmarks:
choose Layout > Table of Contents. Here you can name your table of contents,
set a style, and choose which paragraph styles to include in your table of contents. Be sure to check Create PDF Bookmarks to generate
bookmarks in the exported PDF. You can click More Options to show all of
the available styling options for your table of contents. InDesign tables are generally exported to
PDF with proper table markup tagging. You will need to make sure though that header
rows are assigned in InDesign. To set a table header row, highlight the row
and choose Table > Convert Rows > To Header. You can see that this allows for the table
header cells to be marked properly for screen reader users. When a screen reader encounters a bulleted
or numbered list, it will announce the presence of the list along with a count of the number
of items in the list. For example, “List with 7 items”. It can do this because of the list markup
in the tag tree. When creating lists in InDesign, be sure to
use the built-in bulleted list/numbered list option, otherwise the list items will be read
as a string of continuous text instead of a list. You can customize these to your liking in
the Bullets and Numbering dialog box. As mentioned previously, images and other
graphical content that conveys meaning must include alternative text, or text that will
be read aloud by the screen reader. This text is added to the image export options. To add alternative text to an image
Select the image and choose Object > Object Export Options
In the Alt Text tab choose Custom
You can add your descriptive text here. Alternative text should be brief, but should
accurately describe the image. For an image that contains text like this
one, you should be sure to include all of the text in the alternative text field. Purely decorative images that can safely be
ignored by the screen reader must be designated as such by being tagged as page artifacts. For example, this graphic is purely decorative
and doesn’t convey any meaning so it should be artifacted. To mark an object as an artifact you would
Select the object Choose Object > Object Export Options
Click the Tagged PDF tab And choose Apply Tag: Artifact
Note that if you’ve set the reading order using the Articles panel as we discussed previously,
you can also artifact a decorative object by leaving it out of the reading order. You’re now ready to export your InDesign
document to an accessible PDF. To export to PDF in a way that retains the
accessibility features, use File > Export
Name your file and Save as Type: Adobe PDF In the Options dialog box, in the General
category, you’ll want to make sure that the Adobe PDF Preset is set to Smallest File
Size We want Pages All. View: fit page. Layout: single page. Export as pages and not spreads. Check the box next to View PDF after Exporting
for your own convenience. Check the box next to Create Tagged PDF. Choose Optimize for Fast Web View. Make sure you set the Export Layers to: Visible
& Printable Layers Include Bookmarks and Hyperlinks
It’s not necessary to include Interactive Elements as this refers to interactive form
fields which we aren’t discussing here. If you want to save these settings choose
Save Preset and rename so you can reuse it Now in the
Advanced section choose Display Title: Document Title and
Set the Language The resulting PDF will have a tag tree with
properly marked up headings, tables, and lists. It should have a working table of contents
and PDF bookmarks for navigation. If you check the properties on your images
you should see your alternative text in the image properties. If you want to learn more about accessible
PDFs and PDF remediation, I have another lesson on that topic which I will link in the description. I will also link to additional training resources
from Adobe. If you want to learn more about how to ensure
that your digital content is accessible check out one of the digital accessibility sessions
in the Tufts Learning Center.
